FOUNDING ENGINEER AT INSURANCE STARTUP

San Francisco, CA

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire. We work with companies funded by the best investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, Tiger Global Management, A16Z, Accel, DFJ, and more.

If you are a fit, the team will reach out to you about this role or any others that may be a fit for our clients.

Our Client

Our client is a venture-backed startup building the infrastructure layer for Property & Casualty (P&C) insurance. Integrating technology in the insurance industry today is much like consumer finance pre-Plaid (they could succinctly be described as "Plaid for Insurance"), or payments pre-Stripe, and our vision is to unlock a similar wave of innovation for the $1.6T global P&C industry.

Today, walking into an insurance agency is like stepping into a time machine. Filing cabinets, fax machines, piles of incoming and outgoing mail. What you don't see is that even for the parts that have been "digitized", needless manual work abounds. Few systems communicate directly, leading to endless copy-pasting from emails to various proprietary web portals/desktop apps and back again.

Carrier by carrier, endpoint by endpoint, our client will bring each of those manual and error-prone data transfers into their simple, modern API layer. The implementation details are subject to change, but this is their north star, and the future they envision isn't possible without it.

🔍 What they're looking for

They are seeking a highly autonomous engineer (employee #1!) excited about owning the design and implementation of a robust, API-driven product and playing a foundational role in the formation of the company.

Responsibilities

  • You'll work closely with the team and early customers to build a world-class, API-driven product.
  • You'll solve hard technical problems from scratch, owning the solution through the entire development lifecycle.
  • You'll help define the tech stack/architecture for a fledgling product — they're technology agnostic and focus on using the right tool for the job.
  • You'll contribute to the creation of the team culture, as well as internal tooling and processes.

🛠 Role requirements

  • 4+ years professional backend/full-stack engineering experience. Working on large-scale open-source projects works too. You've played significant roles in either API design, building processing pipelines, or systemic integration of external systems.
  • Early-stage startup experience (or other similar unstructured, fast-paced environment)
  • Live in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area to work full-time in our SF office

💫 Nice to haves

  • Experience with web scraping, email scraping, in general just getting data creatively out of hard-to-reach places
  • 1+ years TypeScript/JavaScript experience in a professional or large-scale OSS setting. If you have a comprehensive side project you think is equivalent, send it our way! Clear, concise, and extensible code is important to them and collaborating with others is often a forcing function to that end.
  • Experience integrating with low tech industries, or other time spent integrating with poorly documented, antiquated APIs (and sometimes even a lack thereof)

🚀 Why you should join our client

  • Opportunity to be a foundational team member to a well-funded startup in a massive and largely untapped industry.
  • Hard backend engineering problems on day 1. Backend is all they do, and the projects you'll work on will be challenging and interesting.
  • Generous equity comp (90th+ percentile) and competitive cash comp (50th percentile). As they're a startup, they're happy to play with the balance for exceptional candidates.

🐛 The Founding Team

The CEO is a strong engineer in his own right (Waterloo grad, senior eng at multiple Bay Area startups) but will be focusing on the business/product side. He’s gone super deep on insurance, including getting a Broker License and a stint as an insurtech EIR at a top VC firm.

They’ve raised funding from great investors including a top seed fund, ex-Plaid folks, and insurance industry insiders.

Benefits: PTO, Healthcare, and More!

Salary Range: $150,000 to $180,000